Nejc Saje   

Experience

• Zemanta, an Outbrain Company (Ljubljana, Slovenia)

  Group Lead, Nov 2021 - Oct 2022, 1 yr

  • split the team I previously managed as Team Lead into two teams
  • managing and coaching the team leads
  • working closely with product and business to align the teams' priorities
  • optimizing organization design, workflows and processes to maximize cooperation between different teams and departments

  Infrastructure and Backend Engineer, Jan 2016 - Aug 2016, 8 mos

  • part of a team that managed company's AWS infrastructure (EC2, RDS, Redshift, SQS, ...)
  • highlight: migrated all company products' metrics from Librato to InfluxDB

  Tech/Team Lead, Jul 2017 - Nov 2021, 4 yrs 5 mos

  • started leading the team of 3 people after reorganization
  • grew it to 13 people over the next few years
  • responsible for
    • architecture & software design (Python, Django, PostgreSQL, AWS, Redshift, ...)
    • operations (PagerDuty, DBA-style work (a personal favorite))
    • project management
    • hiring (including interview process improvements)
    • professional growth of team members (1-1s, reviews etc.)
  • highlight: introduced a lightweight variant of scrum with a focus on retrospectives and continuous feedback that later got adopted across the entire Zemanta engineering organization
  • highlight: developed a set of libraries, documentation and integrations w/ existing infrastructure that allowed the parent company (Outbrain) to adopt Python for a large and growing number of services

  Senior Backend Engineer, Aug 2016 - Jul 2017, 1 yr

  • part of team that developed Zemanta One DSP - company's main user-facing product (Python, Django)
  • highlight: developed secretcrypt library in Python and Go which is still used for secret management in most Zemanta's projects

• OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software

  OpenStack Ceilometer Core Contributor, 2013 - 2015

  • became a Ceilometer Core Contributor in September 2014 on account of the quality of my software design, code and community contributions
  • actively participated in the community on IRC and mailing lists
  • attended OpenStack Summits in Hong Kong, Atlanta and Paris
  • led a design session about Ceilometer alarms improvements at the developer summit in Atlanta
  • commit history available at http://bit.ly/nsaje-openstack-2

• Red Hat (Brno, Czech Republic)

  Software Engineering Intern, July 2014 - September 2014

  • worked on OpenStack Ceilometer cloud metering and monitoring project
  • designed and implemented a major feature of the Juno release, the distributed coordination of Ceilometer Central Agents enabling horizontal scalability
  • designed and implemented other features and fixed Ceilometer bugs
  • took care of Ceilometer RPM packages for RDO and RHEL

• XLAB (Ljubljana, Slovenia)

  Software Engineering Intern, June 2013 - June 2014

  • created a monitoring bridge between Contrail, EU cloud research project, and OpenStack Ceilometer enabling federated cloud monitoring
  • contributed improvements and features back to OpenStack Ceilometer

• Cosylab (Ljubljana, Slovenia)

  Software Engineering Intern, September 2009 - June 2013

  • led a team in charge of implementing a part of a control system for Varian Medical Systems cancer therapy particle accelerator
  • built a Maven RPM packaging plugin for ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) control system software

Education

• M. Eng. in Computer Science and Informatics

  University of Ljubljana (Ljubljana, Slovenia), 2013 - 2016

  • Master's thesis topic: Scalable Monitoring of Large Cloud Systems, project available at https://github.com/nsaje/dagger

• B. Eng. in Computer Science and Mathematics

  University of Ljubljana (Ljubljana, Slovenia), 2010 - 2013

  • Diploma thesis topic: An Efficient Camera-based Approach for Estimating Time-To-Collision